Occasionally-updated blog of a mom trying to instill a love of comics in her kids (because the children are our future).
Monday, May 12, 2008
Silver age DC question
So why is it that they changed Green Lanterns (from Alan to Hal) and Flashes (from Jay to Barry) in the first place, rather than reviving the Golden Age originals?
Well, with Alan and Hal they went from a mystical background to scifi background. Scifi was big in the 60s, so it makes sense they wanted an updated origin.
Right. I think the point was that Flash and Green Lantern had been cancelled, so they were going for something different.
For the Flash, Jay's powers seemed to allow him to get from the front of the house to the back of the house really, really quickly to stop the robbers.
Barry could vibrate through the dimensional barrier and time travel on his cosmic treadmill. It was the same desire the make the character more "sci-fi", but in a different direction than Hal Jordan in space.
When DC (then NPP) decided to restart their super-heroes they gave the task to Julie Schwartz who was always a science fiction fan from his earliest days. When he came to All-American Comics as an editor in the forties all their characters already existed. This was Julie's chance to inject sci-fi into the origins of the new versions. The prevailing theory then was that the comic buying audience turned over every four years when young boys (the primary target market) who started reading comics at age 8 stopped when they turned 12. It had been more than four years since the last Flash story had appeared so they figured no one would remember there had been an earlier version of the character.
3 comments:
Well, with Alan and Hal they went from a mystical background to scifi background. Scifi was big in the 60s, so it makes sense they wanted an updated origin.
Right. I think the point was that Flash and Green Lantern had been cancelled, so they were going for something different.
For the Flash, Jay's powers seemed to allow him to get from the front of the house to the back of the house really, really quickly to stop the robbers.
Barry could vibrate through the dimensional barrier and time travel on his cosmic treadmill. It was the same desire the make the character more "sci-fi", but in a different direction than Hal Jordan in space.
When DC (then NPP) decided to restart their super-heroes they gave the task to Julie Schwartz who was always a science fiction fan from his earliest days. When he came to All-American Comics as an editor in the forties all their characters already existed. This was Julie's chance to inject sci-fi into the origins of the new versions. The prevailing theory then was that the comic buying audience turned over every four years when young boys (the primary target market) who started reading comics at age 8 stopped when they turned 12. It had been more than four years since the last Flash story had appeared so they figured no one would remember there had been an earlier version of the character.
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